"

"Why should we?" asked Mrs. Neff.

"When we get home and tell our friends that we three slew ten Indians,
they will demand some proof of the assertion, and the ten scalps will be
proof."

Samuel Leonardson, boy like, was anxious to have the scalps of his foes,
and so they overruled Mrs. Neff and, turning about, went back to the
camp which was now deserted save by the ghastly dead, their glassy eyes
gazing upward at the skies.

"This is the way he told me to do it," said Samuel, seizing the tuft of
hair on the head of the man who had instructed him in scalping. He ran
the keen edge of a knife around the skull and, by a quick jerk, pulled
off the scalp.

Being novices in the art, it took them some time to remove the scalps
from the heads of all; but the bloody task was finally accomplished and
putting the scalps in a bag, they once more embarked in the Indian canoe
and started down the stream.

"With strong hearts, the three voyagers went down the Merrimac to their
homes, every moment in peril from savages or the elements, and were
received as persons risen from the dead. Mrs. Dustin found her husband
and children saved. Soon after, she went to Boston, carrying with her a
gun and tomahawk, which she had brought from the wigwam, and her ten
trophies, and the general court of Massachusetts gave these brave
sufferers fifty pounds as a reward for their heroism. Ex-Governor
Nicholson, of Maryland, sent a metal tankard to Mrs. Dustin and Mrs.
Neff, as a token of his admiration. That tankard is now (1875) in the
possession of Mr. Emry Coffin, of Newburyport, Massachusetts. During the
summer of 1874, one hundred and seventy-seven years after the event,
citizens of Massachusetts and New Hampshire erected on the highest point
of Dustin's Island an elegant monument, commemorative of the heroic
deed. It displays a figure of Mrs. Dustin, holding in her right hand,
raised in the attitude of striking, a tomahawk, and a bunch of scalps in
the other. On it are inscribed the names of Hannah Dustin, Mary Neff
and Samuel Leonardson, the English lad."[E]

[Footnote E: Lossing's "Our Country," vol. iii., p. 418.]

Haverhill was a second time attacked and desolated during King William's
war, and other places suffered. The treaty at Ryswick, a village near
the Hague, in Holland, soon after, put an end to the indiscriminate
slaughter in Europe and America. At this insignificant little village, a
peace was agreed upon between Louis